Description

---

"The fact that something can be learned about the nature of human beings from their products is the initial hypothesis of Oliver van den Berg, who has become known for his objects made on the basis of technical devices such as radar, flight recorders, and star projectors," writes Hilke Wagner. The resulting sculptures have a futuristic-technoid appearance and, reduced to their perfect surface, they are stripped of their function and returned to the prototypical model. Oliver van den Berg tends to use wood, the sculpting material par excellence, and it is in the contrast between material and function of the technological high-gloss models that he thus reduces the utopias of progress ad absurdum and simultaneously centers on the question of original and copy. "This artistic appropriation, the reduction to aesthetic quality, offers the possibility of disinterested reflection, because every technical invention is simultaneously a projection of human dreams and inadequacies. As such, his work can be positioned within the cultural-historical tradition of man-machine analogies."

About the Author

---

Catherine Nicols is an art and literary scholar, curator, and writer. She completed her doctorate at the University of New South Wales in Sydney in 2001. She has curated a variety of art and cultural history exhibitions, including 2008 “Beuys: The Revolution Is Us,” 2013 “The End oft he 20th Century: The Best Is Yet to Come,” 2016 “Capital: Debt – Territory – Utopia,” all at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in the Hamburger Bahnhof, and 2021 at K20 Kunstsammlung Düsseldorf: “Everyone Is an Artist.” In 2022 she is a Creative Mediator of the 14th Manifesta in Prishtina. Oliver van den Berg, born 1967, was a master student at the HdK Art Academy Berlin and a tutor for molding, casting technology, and metal processing; then he had teaching position at the TU Berlin for plastic design. He has participated with his objects in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including Kunsthaus Zürich (Fly Me to the Moon, 2019), Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (outer space, 2016), Sprengel Museum Hannover (Made in Germany, 2007). He is represented with solo exhibitions at Galerie Kuckei + Kuckei in Berlin, and had in 2010 a solo show at the Michigan Art Museum, Ann Arbor. Nils Röller is a professor at the Zurich University oft he Arts. His research focuses on the relation between text, image, and philosophy (Iconography of Philosophy). In the Journal of Art, Sex and Mathematics he publishes experimental texts in collaboration with artists and poets since 2006. Also Nils Röller edits in a team the platform “Text-Image Parergon.” Recent publications are on Dieter Roth and Oswald Wiener.